Help for students, part 4: Exam panic

Exam panic is a tricky problem, because once you experience it, it can make you worry about panicking in the future. Once you are anxious about panicking, that makes it all the more likely. Fortunately there is a way to fix this. The solution is, go ahead and panic… sort of.

The problem: you see an exam but your brain sees certain death.

Your brain is an amazing bit of biology that has evolved over millions of years to serve the needs of our ancestors. Unfortunately, somewhere during that evolutionary process it became a toddler-like entity which, regardless of your good intentions, is willful, easily bored, and prone to inconvenient emotional outbursts. It learned a few good tricks that were suitable for helping our ancestors to escape from predators and each other, but since then it has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that those same tricks can be counterproductive when dealing with anxiety over situations that are not likely to kill you.

Brains do not react well to certain death.

When you see an exam and feel anxious, your brain sees something else entirely. As far as it’s concerned, that exam is actually a large carnivore about to eat you for lunch. Your brain will try its best to persuade you that you are about to die, and that you should run for your life. Your brain is wrong, but it is also convincing.

Expect some exam anxiety or even outright panic, but realize that you don’t have to accept what your brain is telling you about the situation. Sit back and let it have a fit, like you’re waiting out a child’s temper tantrum. Without your complicity, your brain will not maintain its high panic state, and will settle down again in a few minutes. If you happen to imagine it as an obnoxious pinkish-grey wrinkly thing running back and forth, waving its arms in the air, and screaming at the top of its lungs, that might speed things along.

Sometimes you just have to wait them out.

Exam panic is only a disaster if you think it is. If you begin to panic, and mistakenly believe that the panic is the result of an accurate assessment of your situation, then more panic follows. Even worse, when you panic, your cognitive functioning can diminish- amongst other things, you can forget what you’ve studied. So now you’re suddenly unable to remember anything you studied, and becoming convinced that you are facing catastrophe. This leads to the all too common experience of blanking on an exam only to suddenly remember all of the answers 30 minutes later, once you’ve begun to relax.

Unfortunately, you can’t leave it at home.

Fortunately, this can be managed by expecting that your brain will do stupid things in response to stress, realizing that you might have to let it freak out for a while, and then just waiting until it has regained its composure.